One month in.

Week Five

It's taken a full month, but on Monday I finally made it to the Meldeamt and am now officially registered as a citizen of Salzburg. You're technically meant to do it within the first three days of living here, but luckily the woman didn't ask too many questions so I seem to have gotten away with it!

That night 8 of us (in 2 teams of 4) went to a Quiz Night at the university. Although the room was full with other teams, the only real competition was between our 2 groups. It was decided that whichever team lost would cook the winner's dinner later that week. Our team had a strong start in the History round, a surprisingly strong performance in Science and Technology that none of us were expecting but unfortunately a pretty poor score in the Geography round let us down and we ended up losing by one question. So near, yet so far...

The rest of the week was again mainly been getting more used to the routine, seeing a few of the other TA's, doing the conversation course etc so instead of boring you with those details I thought I'd share some of the things I've noticed during my first month here.

Firstly, although I hate to say it, the stereotypes do seem to be true. Most Austrians are excellent hikers, could probably ski before they could walk, love a good beer or three, are not the biggest fans of the Germans and can be pretty direct when they talk. However, I know now what to expect when an Austrian suggests a 'hike' and am learning to take some conversations with a pinch of salt which helps to bridge the culture gap.

A second thing I've noticed is that they definitely don't scrimp on the heating here. I know that the country gets pretty cold, but it's so warm that the students can wander around school in vest tops and as soon as you get on a bus or a train you have to take off about three layers to avoid completely overheating. I feel that when it comes to the heating, finding a happy medium would more than suffice!

Similarly besides the heating on the public transport I've noticed that on the whole people are very good at giving up their seats for the elderly which is always nice to see.

Thirdly, there seems to be a very conflicting sense of 'national identity' and national pride going on here. Friday the 26th October was the Nationaler Feiertag (national holiday), which commemorates Austria officially becoming 'Austria' as we know it today, with the end of the Occupation. Although there is clearly some sense of national pride, with so many of my students repeatedly telling me how much better Austria is than Germany, there really wasn't much of it to be seen here. There were a few token flags hanging around the city centre but on the whole the day passed pretty inconspicuously. A lot of it has to do with the negative connotations of nationalism and I find the whole mentality surrounding it incredibly interesting.

I'll leave it at three this time as I feel that some of my other blog posts have gotten a bit long. Thanks for sticking with it and reading them to the end for those that have, for those that couldn't I'm going to try and monitor the length of them in the future!